Welcome,
From my experience with having both cropped and uncropped animals at the same house with the same neighbors, etc is: While I prefer the look of the cropped dog, and truly believe it shows off the head better, I left my male uncropped. Life is so much easier with this dog than the cropped one. I have a 4yr old child, take him to her school for visits with the class, plays (supervised) w/ the neighbor kids, don't get all the ignorant questions, people don't recoil when they see him, etc. The cropped dog always got the the first question, is she nice?, why do you have a fighting dog?, that is a big pit, want to breed? blah blah blah. Parents of my daughter's friends were very concerned when they saw her in part b/c her ears were cropped, 1st impressions. Also my insurance guy is a family friend, he strongly believes having an uncropped dog will create less concern should anything bad ever happen, he says they don't know what kind of dog it is just that he's big, the cropped dog automatically brought up questions regarding breed, aggressiveness, etc. Life with a natural eared dog is so much easier, you have to remember, when talking with a lot of people you meet while out and this sounds bad, but, you need to start at the lowest common denominator, and in general people aren't smart, often ignorant (when it comes to dogs) so the info you give them needs to be easy so they can't butcher it when they pass it along, kind of like the telephone game. I guess I would rather deal with "that is a big funny looking lab cross" than the "that's a huge pitbull, how do they fight?" and, in general ,the type of people/attitudes those questions attract. Again, I prefer the look of a cropped dog, but I like to keep my life simple, life is hard enough as it is. These dogs have the size, you certainly don't need to crop the ears because you want the "mean look", attititudes like that, in my opinion, are what will cause more issues for the breed here in the US. We need to be good stewards for the breed, cropping is a personal thing, what works best in your life, etc, I like cropped dogs, but I don't care for the attitude behind some of the reasons as above. Sorry for the long diatribe, again Welcome, you will find tons of great information here.
